The Reconstruction of American Journalism
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The Reconstruction of American Journalism A report by Leonard Downie, Jr. Michael Schudson Vice President at Large Professor The Washington Post Columbia University Professor, Arizona State University Graduate School of Journalism October 20, 2009 The Reconstruction of American Journalism By Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed. As almost everyone knows, the economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers, long supported by advertising, is collapsing, and newspapers themselves, which have been the country’s chief source of independent reporting, are shrinking— literally. Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the twentieth century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending. Commercial television news, which was long the chief rival of printed newspapers, has also been losing its audience, its advertising revenue, and its reporting resources. Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeable future, despite frequent predictions of their imminent extinction. But they will play diminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being reinvented, the character of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across a greater number and variety of news organizations, new and old. The questions that 1 this transformation raise are simple enough: What is going to take the place of what is being lost, and can the new array of news media report on our nation and our communities as well as—or better than—journalism has until now? More importantly—and the issue central to this report—what should be done to shape this new landscape, to help assure that the essential elements of independent, original, and credible news reporting are preserved? We believe that choices made now and in the near future will not only have far-reaching effects but, if the choices are sound, significantly beneficial ones. Some answers are already emerging. The Internet and those seizing its potential have made it possible—and often quite easy—to gather and distribute news more widely in new ways. This is being done not only by surviving newspapers and commercial television, but by start-up online news organizations, nonprofit investigative reporting projects, public broadcasting stations, university-run news services, community news sites with citizen participation, and bloggers. Even government agencies and activist groups are playing a role. Altogether, they are creating a greater variety of independent reporting missions and even different definitions of news. Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers, but freelancers, university faculty members, students, and citizens armed with smart phones. Financial 2 support for reporting now comes not only from advertisers and subscribers, but also from foundations, individual philanthropists, academic and government budgets, special interests, and voluntary contributions from readers and viewers. There is now increased competition among the different kinds of news gatherers, but there also is more cooperation, a willingness among news organizations to share resources and reporting with former competitors. That increases the value and impact of the news they produce, and creates new identities for reporting while keeping old, familiar ones alive. “I have seen the future, and it is mutual,” said Alan Rusbridger, editor of Britain’s widely read Guardian newspaper and Web site. He sees a collaborative journalism emerging, what he calls a “mutualized newspaper.” The Internet has made all of this possible, but it also has undermined the traditional marketplace support for American journalism. The Internet’s easily accessible free information and low-cost advertising have loosened the hold of large, near-monopoly news organizations on audiences and advertisers. As this report will explain, credible independent news reporting cannot flourish without news organizations of various kinds, including the print and digital reporting operations of surviving newspapers. But it is unlikely that any but the smallest of these news organizations can be supported primarily by existing online revenue. That is why we will be exploring a variety and mixture of ways to support news 3 reporting, which must include nonmarket sources like philanthropy and government. The way news is reported today did not spring from an unbroken tradition. Rather, journalism changed, sometimes dramatically, as the nation changed—its economics (because of the growth of large retailers in major cities), demographics (because of the shifts of population from farms to cities and then to suburbs), and politics (because early on, political parties controlled newspapers and later lost power over them). In the early days of the republic, newspapers did little or no local reporting—in fact, those early newspapers were almost all four-page weeklies, each produced by a single proprietor-printer-editor with a few apprentices and no reporters. They published much more foreign than local news, reprinting stories they happened to see in London papers they received in the mail, much as Web news aggregators do today. What local news they did provide consisted mostly of short items or bits of intelligence brought in by their readers, without verification by the printer. Most of what American newspapers did from the time that the First Amendment was ratified, in 1791, until well into the nineteenth century was to provide an outlet for opinion, often stridently partisan. Newspaper printers owed their livelihoods and loyalties to political parties. Not until the 1820s and 1830s did they begin to hire reporters to gather news actively rather than wait for it to come 4 to them. By the late nineteenth century, urban newspapers grew more prosperous, ambitious, and powerful. Although some remained staunchly partisan, others began to proclaim their political independence. At the same time, reporters at those papers were often beholden to the whims of owners, who still had strong views of their own and were frequently beholden themselves to advertisers and potential advertisers. In the first half of the twentieth century, even though earnings at newspapers were able to support a more professional culture of reporters and editors, reporting was often limited by complaisance and deference to politicians and other figures of authority. By the 1960s, though, more journalists at a number of prosperous metropolitan newspapers were showing increasing skepticism about pronouncements from government and other centers of power. What had been, with notable exceptions, a cozy relationship between reporters and officials became more distant and prickly as more reporters worked to hold the powerful accountable. More newspapers began to encourage “accountability reporting” that often comes out of beat coverage and targets those who have power and influence in our lives—not only governmental bodies, but also businesses and educational and cultural institutions. Federal regulatory pressure on broadcasters to take the public service requirements of their licenses seriously also encouraged greater investment in news. 5 A serious commitment to accountability journalism did not spread universally throughout newspapers or broadcast media, but abundant advertising revenue during the profitable last decades of the century gave the historically large staffs of many urban newspapers an opportunity to significantly increase the quantity and quality of their reporting. An extensive American Journalism Review study of the content of ten metropolitan newspapers across the country, for the years 1964–65 and 1998–1999, found that overall the amount of news these papers published doubled—with individual increases ranging from 59 percent in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and 77 percent in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to 141 percent in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and 144 percent in the Houston Chronicle. Not all of the additional news was aggressive local reporting that, for example, kept a close watch on government. Nor were newspaper readers necessarily twice as well informed in 1999 as they were in 1965; in eight of the ten cities studied, a competing newspaper died during that period. The concept of news also was changing. The percentage of news categorized in the study as local, national, and international declined from 35 percent to 24 percent, while business news doubled from 7 to 15 percent, sports increased from 16 to 21 percent, and features, from 23 to 26 percent. Because the total amount of space for news had doubled, the sum of local, national, and international news still increased by 25 percent. 6 Newspapers moved from a preoccupation with government, usually in response to specific events, to a much broader understanding of public life that included not just events, but also patterns and trends, and not just in politics, but also in science, medicine, business, sports, education, religion, culture, and entertainment. These developments were driven in part by the market. Editors sought to slow the loss of readers turning to broadcast or cable television, or